Contests are prevalent in many areas, including sports, rent seeking, patent races, innovation inducement, labor markets, scientific projects, crowdsourcing and other online services, and allocation of computer system resources. This book provides unified, comprehensive coverage of contest theory as developed in economics, computer science, and statistics, with a focus on online services applications, allowing professionals, researchers and students to learn about the underlying theoretical principles and to test them in practice. The book sets contest design in a game-theoretic framework that can be used to model a wide-range of problems and efficiency measures such as total and individual output and social welfare, and offers insight into how the structure of prizes relates to desired contest design objectives. Methods for rating the skills and ranking of players are presented, as are proportional allocation and similar allocation mechanisms, simultaneous contests, sharing utility of productive activities, sequential contests, and tournaments.

Using a game-theoretic framework, this unified, comprehensive treatment of contest design in economics and computer science focuses on online applications.

Preface pp xiii-xviii 1 - Introduction and Preview pp 1-40 2 - Standard All-Pay Contest pp 41-94 3 - Rank-Order Allocation of Prizes pp 95-156 4 - Smooth Allocation of Prizes pp 157-222 5 - Simultaneous Contests pp 223-300 6 - Utility Sharing and Welfare pp 301-358 7 - Sequential Contests pp 359-442 8 - Tournaments pp 443-500 9 - Rating Systems pp 501-562 10 - Ranking Methods pp 563-616 11 - Appendix pp 617-680 References pp 681-708 Index to Notations pp 709-712 Index pp 713-717